Introduction: 4 Easy Steps for a Successful Photo Blog

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About: Ivan Dimitrijevic is a seasoned blogger and SEO consultant with years of experience. His skill sets include Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and blogging on a wide variety of topics. He is a …

If you are a photographer, running a photo blog would have multiple benefits for you. Not only would you work on promoting yourself, but it may also help you, make you practice more and eventually lead you to becoming a better photographer than you already are. The whole point of a photo blog is that it is just a blog, but instead of words, you are using photos. It is not a portfolio website, because on a photo blog, you can present your not-so-good photos, without suffering the consequences for it.

Step 1: Find Your Place

How do you start, you may ask? Well, you need to choose a platform, and the choice is huge. It depends on what you want to do with your photos - do you want high sociability or to simply showcase your photos? The best choices today are WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, so let’s explain in short how each of them works. WordPress comes in two shapes - one is integrated into their website, and you have a downloadable and customizable version that you need to install onto your server space, which means that you will need to find good hosting. It offers a very big bag of options for you to tinker with. Remember, you want to show your photos, not set up an entirely new website, so although you will have more power, you will need to spend a little time setting it up. But in return, it gives you some banging photo plug-ins. Blogger is a Google product that is ultra simple and has a fast and painless setup process, and a very basic photo sharing utility. Tumblr is ultra-simple, a highly social photo sharing community that exploded in popularity over the past few years and it offers an unlimited amount of themes you can use, thus bringing customization and simplicity closer to you for that unique look you are looking for.

Step 2: Arrangement

Your blog must be unique and easily recognized, keep your consistency, weather it is in captions, language and overall design, it must be recognizable. Always resize photos to the same dimensions, devise a publishing schedule so your viewers won’t feel spammed, and so they can know when to expect content from you. Think about question boxes and whether or not do you want to have a comment section, since sometimes it can make or break a blog, or over-clog it design-wise. Avoid other media types - you are running a photo blog, not a YouTube channel, or a discussion board for knitting techniques and other nonsense, it can turn down your viewer audience, make the blog messy and unattractive. Simplicity is the key. On the other hand you can integrate a regular blog to provide content and updates to go with your photography just make sure that that content is worth your audience's time.

Step 3: Get Out There

Promote yourself and involve your audience to promote you - don’t be one of those high and proud photographers who think of themselves as gods behind the shutter button. Be involved, the comment section is useful for that, since you can ask people what would they like to see from you. Maybe make a short review of the kit you are using. There is enough material for you to start an entirely new blog on that subject. You can share the work of other photographers if you have the opportunity for that on your blog. Tumblr is perfect for that, it has a “reblog”function, other photographers will appreciate that and probably return the favor. Pay attention, monitor the events on your blog, don’t let it get stale and old, and listen to the viewers and their needs and suggestions.

Step 4: Make Yourself Easily Found (SEO)

Search engine optimization is an important promotional tool every photo blogger needs, because it happened too many times that a photo was labeled “img_001.jpg”and got lost on the internet forever, rendering Google useless when searching for it. If you are a professional photographer that is using his blog to promote his business, and optimizing for SEO will greatly improve your chances for being found and getting one wedding gig extra. The key is to label everything and be as specific as possible, so that your photos will stand out at the first page of Google search and not be stuck on the 52nd page where nobody goes. Keywords are important, and they must describe the photos, and be unique at the same time. Avoid one word labels and try and think of something fresh every time. Don’t overdo it though, since you don’t want it to look like Instagram, hashtag party.

Step 5: Conclusion

Photo blogging is a simple tool and can be a fun and educational hobby that can promote you on the one hand, and help you get better at photography on the other. Just mind these 4 steps, and you will be on your way!